With the rapid increase in Internet access and usage enjoyed by the general population in recent years, much publishing activity has shifted from traditional printed media to the Internet. Advantageously, online publishing is comparatively cheap, and provides a very large potential audience with access to the published content. In addition, it facilitates estimating the size of the actual audience and assessing how the published content is received by tracking website visitors and their interactions with the content. For example, the traffic to a particular website (e.g., as measured in terms of the total number of visits or the number of unique visitors in a given time span) can easily be ascertained, providing a useful metric for the general level of interest in the site. Similarly, the reputation that a website enjoys can be measured, for instance, based on the number of links directed to that site from other websites. In a commercial context, the click-through rate for advertisements is an important metric of the advertisements'effectiveness. For documents posted online, the number of downloads is a good indicator of a document's popularity.
While such web-traffic and related information can be useful feedback to the author, publisher, or other interested parties (e.g., online users searching for content on particular subjects), it typically provides only a rough conclusory indicator about the overall reception of certain content, but fails to provide any direct insight into the underlying reasons for and factors contributing to the content's popularity and reputation, leaving those up to speculation and/or experimentation through modifications to the content. Accordingly, there is room for improvements in tracking and analyzing user interactions with published content, and for acting upon collected user-interaction data.